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Top ranking with no SEO

I ran an SEOMoz keyword difficulty report for the term "interim CFO services" and found that all of the websites that ranked really well for that term have good page authority and domain authority scores and plenty of incoming links.....except 1.

result #5 has a page and domain authority of 1 and no incoming links, however it's ranked #5 in google SERP for this highly competitive term.

see screenshots:

http://screencast.com/t/NJiOn8N4l

http://screencast.com/t/x6tU1RhX4j

Is this ranking based solely on the domain name being 100% relevant?

Did they just get lucky and hit the google rankings jackpot?

If this is the case, by the same logic I am trying achieve high rankings for the keyword "outsourced accounting firm" and purchased the domain name outsourcedaccountingfirm.com and am not even ranked in the top 50 with google for that keyword. (it's very new though) any feedback on either questions above would be greatly appreciated.

4 Responses

Fortunately or unfortunately Google still gives pretty good weight to exact match domains and for the search query you pointed you I think its definitely possible that the domain is what got it the high positions.

The #5 ranking site is:interimcfoservices.net - registered 2 years, not many links and not much authority.

However, Google is reducing the authority of exact match domains so I wouldn't go out my way and invest in such domains as it is unlikely to benefit in SEO in the long run.

What many do not consider or cannot calculate is the number of visitrs/ potential clients lost due to to having such a keywordy" domains that not only appear unprofessional but are very difficult to remember.

In addition to their exact match domain, their on-page SEO has been almost perfectly optimized for the search term. They get an A on SEOmoz's keyword score card, hitting 4/4 critical, 6/7 high importance, 9/9 medium importance, and 9/11 low importance factors.

Buying and optimizing exact match domains isn't really a good long term strategy as Syed mentions. However if you already have some, I would optimize them as landing pages for the term, with the call to action being to visit your actual website. On the other hand, that effort is probably better spent optimizing a page on your main domain for the term.

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